Clifford Simak - No Life of Their Own And Other Stories

Cameron lit a cigarette and tried to explain.

“Your mind sticks on the mechanical part,” he said. “Pascal’s theory isn’t all mechanics or all mathematics, although there’re plenty of both. There’re a lot of psychological concepts and that’s one place where they come in. He figures that even if time is non-existent, even if it has no factual identity, that the human brain has a well-developed time-sense. Time seems entirely natural to us. Viewed from the commonplace point of view, there is absolutely no mystery about it. It is firmly embedded in the human consciousness.

“Pascal figured that if you constructed a mechanical brain you could construct it in such a manner that its time-sense would be enormously magnified. Maybe ten thousand times that of a human mind. Maybe more. There’s no way to tell. So Pascal not only constructed the mechanical counterpart of a human brain, but he constructed it with an exaggerated time-sense. That brain over there knows more about time right now than the human race will ever know. Nobody else on Earth could have done it. No twentieth-century man. Pascal’s a wizard. That’s what he is.”

“Listen, Hugh,” said Cabot, “I want to be sure. I sent over to America, had you come out to London because I knew that if any man could tell me anything about this pipe-dream it would be you. I want you to feel absolutely certain. I can’t understand it myself. I figure you can. If you have any doubt, say so now. I don’t want to get stuck halfway back in time.”

Cameron puffed away at his smoke.

“It isn’t a pipe-dream, Jack. It’s the goods. The time-sense in the brain is developed to a point where it has an ability to assume mastery over time. It can move through time. What’s more, it can move the time-tractor through time—with all of us inside the tractor. Not hypnotism, because in hypnotism you only think you’re some place or doing something that isn’t so.

“The brain actually can move back and forth in time and it can move us back and forth in time. It develops some sort of a force. Not electricity. Pascal thought it was that at first. But it isn’t, although it’s related to electricity. For want of a better term we might call it a time-force. That describes it well enough. It develops this force in sufficient amount to operate the control mechanism that guides the brain’s movement through time.”

He flipped his hands helplessly.

“That’s all I can tell you. The rest of it is mathematics that would be pure Greek to you and mechanics that you’d have to take eight years of college to understand.”

He looked at Cabot.

“You have to take my word for it, Jack, that the damn thing will run.”

Cabot smiled.

“That’s good enough for me, Hugh,” he said.

A shadow blotted out the sunlight on the floor. The three looked toward the door.

Dr. Thomas Pascal stood there, a white-haired man with a face that was almost childish in its simplicity. He was one of 1940’s scientific wizards.

“All ready to start?” he asked cheerfully.

Cameron nodded.

“Everything seems all right, Doctor,” he said. “I’ve checked every cable, every cog, every contact. They’re all in perfect order.”

“All right, then,” growled Yancey. “What are we waiting for. I’m all set to slaughter me a saber-tooth.”

“You’ll find plenty of them,” Pascal told him. “I told you I’d take you to a virgin game field. A place where a rifle shot had never been fired. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Cameron laughed.

“Doctor,” he asked, “how did you ever get the idea of selling these two mad hunters on this proposition? A hunting trip back into time. That’s one for the records.”

“I needed money to finish the tractor,” Pascal told him, “so I cast around for someone who might be interested, but interested in such a way that my invention would not be used for base ends. Then I heard of Mr. Cabot and Mr. Yancey. Plenty of money. Famous hunters. What could be more appealing to them than a hunting trip back into the past? But they weren’t easy to convince. They listened only when I consented to let you check the entire machine.”

Cabot shook his head stubbornly.

“Doctor, you still have to show me those game fields back in the Riss-Wurm interglacial period. It’s fifty thousand years or more back there. A long ways to go.”

“You’ll eat mammoth steak for dinner tonight,” Pascal told him.

“If you’re going to make good on that promise,” Cameron suggested, “we had better get started. All our supplies are stored, the machinery is checked. We’re ready.”

“All right,” agreed Pascal. “Will someone shut the door and make sure the ports are closed?”

Yancey walked to the doorway, reached out to pull the door shut and lock it. For a moment he stood still, staring out over the green hills. There, only a few miles away, lay the village of Aylesford. And beyond lay the valley of the Thames. A country steeped in legend and history. In a few minutes they would be moving back, through and beyond the days which had given rise to that legend and history. Two American hunters on the maddest hunting trip the world had ever known.

Yancey closed the door, chuckling.

“Wonder how much lead it takes to stop a saber-tooth?” he mused.

Turning back to the interior of the great tractor, he saw that the time-brain was glowing greenly. Dr. Pascal, standing before it, seemed like a tiny, misshapen gnome, working before a fiery furnace.

“Door closed and locked,” Yancey reported.

“Ports all tight,” said Cabot.

“Okay,” replied Pascal.

Machinery hummed faintly, nothing more than a whisper of a sound.

There was nothing to indicate they had left the present, were moving backward through time, but when Yancey looked through a port, he choked back an exclamation.

There was nothing outside the port. Just a blank, flat, gray plane of nothingness, with now and then shadows that flitted and were gone.

Pascal sucked in his breath as the tractor rocked and bumped. The gray outside the port became less dense. Objects became faintly discernible.

“We’re going too fast,” Pascal explained. “Ground seems to be rising. Have to take it slower. We might hit something. Most things wouldn’t stop us, but there’s no use taking chances.”

“Sure the ground is rising,” Cameron told him. “Maybe by this time there isn’t any English channel. Back in the Riss-Wurm period the British Isles were connected with the continent. The Thames flowed north through the North Sea basin to reach the North Sea.”

The gray outside the ports thinned even more. The tractor rocked like a boat in a gentle swell. Then the grayness turned to white, a dazzling white that blinded Yancey. The tractor moved sharply upward, seemed to be riding a huge wave, then dropped, but more slowly.

“We just passed the Wurm glacier,” Pascal told them. “We’re in the Riss-Wurm now.”

“Take it just a little easier,” Cameron warned him. “That last bump busted a tube in the field radio. We can fix that, but we may need that radio. We don’t want to smash it entirely.”

Outside the port now Yancey could make out objects. A tree became clearer, was sharply defined and beyond it Yancey saw solid landscape, bathed in a rising sun.

He heard Pascal’s voice.

“Seventy thousand years, approximately,” he said. “We should be where we intended to go.”

But Yancey was intent on the scene outside. The tractor stood on the top of a high knoll. Below unfolded a panorama of wild beauty. Rolling hills fell away to a wide valley, green with lush grass, while in the distance a stream caught the sunlight of early dawn and glinted like a ribbon of silver. And on the hills and in the valley below were black dots, feeding game herds, some so close he could make out individual animals. Others mere black spots.